Page 137 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

124 The French Diplomats

his encounter with Hitler, and during the conversation Phipps noted that
he was “struck” by the negative tenor of his own recent conversation with
Hitler, during which the Führer was more acerbic than he had ever been
with the French ambassador. Phipps noted that Hitler was “puffed up”
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and not at all in a mood to agree to “reasonable” suggestions. the British
ambassador was annoyed that the account in the press of his talk with Hit-
ler, drafted under the direction of Neurath, falsely claimed that the discus-
sion of a pact on air warfare (to avoid targeting civilians) and the limitation
of rearmament had made progress. Why François-Poncet sent the Foreign
Office this report on his meeting with Phipps as an addendum that he spe-
cifically marked “secret” is not clear. Could it be that the ambassador did
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not want it to be generally known that in his presence Hitler tended to be
more restrained than he was in meetings with the British ambassador?

the march into the rhineland

On March 7, 1936, Hitler made his most daring and provocative move
yet in international affairs by sending German troops into the rhineland,
an area fifty kilometers east of the rhine that had been declared a demili-
tarized zone in 1919. Germany’s violation of the agreement regarding this
area did not surprise François-Poncet. On March 6, he informed Paris that
he had learned from a “generally well-informed” source that on March 2
the Führer had asked several senior reichswehr officers how long it would
take to occupy the demilitarized area and how much time they would need
to organize adequate defenses against a French attack. Hitler considered
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such a move very risky and ordered the army to be prepared to retreat in
the event of strong resistance by the French military. For the allies, this was
almost certainly the last time that they could have taken forceful action
against Hitler without risking a major conflagration. Germany was still too
weak to defeat the French, and a retreat by the reichswehr would have
been deeply embarrassing and a sharp political blow to the Führer.
For the French ambassador, the aggressive move by Germany once again
raised questions that he had not been able to answer to his own satisfaction.
Had the leaders of Germany lied all along when they declared that they
would respect the treaty provisions concerning the rhineland? Had Hitler
once again adopted the views of the most radical and most violent Nazis?
François-Poncet now believed that Hitler had always followed a single pat-

For more details, see above, pp. 44–46.